Why Being “a YouTuber” Isn’t Enough

YouTube’s done a lot toward giving your average Joe a soapbox. Heck, my dad — far from being average, but a Joe, nonetheless — even has a YouTube channel. And it used to be that anyone willing to devote the time to making good, regular, and original videos to feature on YouTube could make some pretty good money either as a supplement to other income or as a full-time job.

Now, however, with shrinking ad revenue that even content producers with millions of page views have been noticing, it seems that devoting one’s time to try and eke out a living purely on YouTube is becoming not just difficult, but impossible. Still, there are people who insist that content producers somehow owe the world free content even if there’s no hope of financial reciprocation. As if we’ve sold out by daring to believe that we, like anyone else who works for a living, should get a paycheck at the end of our workday.